Tag Archives: FOIA Requests

The BBC serves Freedom of Information request (FOIA) on UK Government over weather forecast failures secrecy in worst winter for 100 years.

In an almighty battle to salvage credibility three British government institutions are embroiled in a new global warming scandal with the BBC mounting a legal challenge to force ministers to admit the truth. Sceptics ask: Is the UK government’s climate propaganda machine finally falling apart?

Last week the weather service caused a sensation by making the startling claim that it was gagged by government ministers from issuing a cold winter forecast. Instead, a milder than average prediction was made that has been resoundingly ridiculed in one of the worst winters in a century.

With the BBC appearing to take the side of the Met Office by seeking to force the government to give honest answers, untold harm will likely befall Prime Minister Cameron’s global warming policies on energy, taxation and the environment.

Rift between BBC, Met Office and UK Government Grows

Speculation in newspapers and the blogosphere has festered for the past week as Chris Huhne, minister in charge of the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) stubbornly remain silent. I contacted the BBC’s Environment Analyst Roger Harrabin, one of the world’s senior journalists on such matters to ascertain if the Beeb had a better handle on the story.

Harrabin advised me, “I phoned the Met Office about this statement and the Met Office press office told me they’d given information to the Cabinet Office that we were facing an early cold winter.”

Mention of the ‘secret’ cold winter forecast appears in the Quarmby Report (Section 2.4) which states, “The Met Office gave ‘early indications of the onset of a cold spell from late November’ at the end of October.”

Giving a strong hint that a major rift appears to have opened up between Met Office chief executive, John Hirst and Climate Minister, Huhne, Harrabin further revealed, “The Beeb now has an FoI [freedom of information request] to Cabinet Office requesting verbatim info from [the] Met Office.”

In what may well be an orchestrated manoeuvre between the Met Office and Mark Thompson, Director-General of the BBC the freedom of information demand will heap huge embarrassment on David Cameron’s gaffe-prone coalition government.

Ministers Facing Accusations of Malfeasance of Public Office

If the Beeb succeeds in forcing Cameron’s government to come clean it looks probable hat government ministers intentionally conspired to withhold vital severe weather forecast information placing both lives and jobs at risk. So far losses to the UK economy linked to this year’s severe winter weather are estimated to be above £10 billion.

MP’s Call for Official Parliamentary Probe

Dr. Benny Peiser of Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF ) reports (January 10, 2011) that Liverpool MP Louise Ellman, chairman of the Transport Select committee, is angling to be appointed to head such an official parliamentary probe.
“The current winter fiasco is no longer a joke as the economic damage to the British economy as a result of the country’s ill-preparedness is running at £1bn a day and could reach more than £15 billion,” said Dr Peiser, the GWPF’s Director.
But if the coalition government gives in to demands for a full inquiry, which is as likely as turkeys voting for Christmas, then no doubt heads will roll in high places.

I got a “tweet” from Watts Up With That” this morning about NASA being sued per this article, which led to me reading their take on it, which linked to an article on The American Spectator by Chris Horner about it. Here’s their take on it, my take on it, and some legal information from John O’Sullivan at the end.

CEI (The Competitive Enterprise Institute) is suing NASA because they’ve been requesting documents for about 3 years under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and NASA has been avoiding them like “warmers” avoid global cooling.

This morning in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the Competitive Enterprise Institute is filing suit against NASA, calling the erstwhile space agency to account for its nearly three-year stonewall of access to internal documents exposing an abuse of taxpayer funds to advance the global warming agenda.

Seems there’s a lot going on at this agency that perhaps the general public is unaware of and the “warmers” either condone or look the other way about. Based upon the information from the two source websites, NASA has been running a website, probably with your tax dollars, to surreptitiously try to back up their BS about anthropogenic global warming. It’s called RealClimate.org, which is by the “warmers” for the “warmers” and of the “warmers.” Evidently the people at GISS and NASA never watched Superman when they were kids and “truth, justice and the American way” are completely foreign to them.

In this process, if only thanks to pressure on NASA after a December 2009 news story about their games, we have already obtained important emails among 2,000 or so pages released. These include an admission to USA Today’s weather editor that NASA GISS is just a modeling office, using the temperature record of …CRU, the ClimateGate outfit. That means their “independent temperature record” is actually a recapitulation of one that …doesn’t exist, but was withdrawn as a result of ClimateGate when the custodians admitted they actually lost all original data.

So whether the CRU claims were actually made up, as seems entirely plausible reading that crowd’s own nasty anti-scientific campaign in their own words, it is as good as made up, meaning non-existent, for any legal or scientific purpose. So we already know that two of the four supposed “independent temperature records” are down the drain. And they’re the only two subjected to anything resembling scrutiny.

Sounds like NASA is so full of it they actually had to start another site to get the general public to believe what they evidently can’t back up. They’re hiding out about that, too.

Also along the way, in recent months we won on administrative appeal after NASA denied that documents created and held on NASA assets were really agency records, if editing and managing a third-party activist and advocacy site, RealClimate.org. NASA originally denied access to the records (which they are still withholding) on the grounds that taxpayer-funded scientists were actually moonlighting and so the documents were not really the government’s property.

I had to ask what are the implications of all of this. As such I forwarded this to John O’Sullivan for his expert legal opinion on what’s actually going on beyond the obvious allegations that NASA is not only pumping out bald-faced lies, but actually is running a website with taxpayer funds to try to back the bald-faced lies up. Mr. O’Sullivan sent me the following email.

John,

Great link-thanks. CEI are onto something here and if they have smart attorneys they will, at some point along the legal line, employ the doctrine of spoliation (i.e. file a motion for relief for NASA’s evidence destruction/withholding).

If CEI’s lawyers have a credible prima facie case indicating taxpayer funds were misappropriated into, for example, creating and maintaining the advocacy website, ‘Real Climate,’ then the burden of proof shifts to the respondents (ie.Gavin Schmidt and James Hansen et al.) to disprove CEI’s claims-unreasonably denying the FOIA claims for a 3-year period may, in itself, be sufficient to cost NASA the case.

The law requires that if during this process, NASA fails to furnish any subpoenaed documents relevant to the CEI’s case, because they may have become ‘lost’ or destroyed, then those persons (but more likely NASA) become liable, under the spoliation doctrine, to a motion for summary judgment or an adverse inference jury instruction.

In plain speak, under U.S. civil and criminal law, any party destroying or hiding key evidence is very likely to lose the case. The result will probably be that the CEI claims will be upheld. But will anyone go to jail? Unlikely.

Because, just as in the U.K, American FOIA laws may ultimately prove toothless. Such regulations are ostensibly enacted and enforced by the current representatives of the people (i.e. the govt) for the benefit of the people (or in reality, the government). So, in effect, the whole circus may well be spun out, stymied or down played long enough to spare the blushes of the incumbent ruling political party.

So that all that may result is some ‘smacked hands’ and a token level of disrepute for the institution (NASA). As we saw in Britain (with CRU) an incumbent pro-warmist government like the current administration is not going to willingly pursue prosecutions that may create setbacks for their cap and trade agenda.

The U.S. Establishment will hope it all blows over, especially with the backdrop of a compliant-almost myopic-mainstream media that won’t make a fuss,either. I’m sure that’s close to what these characters hold up their sleeve.

Regards,

John

As you can see Mr. O’Sullivan is very aware of the laws regarding this and that while it sounds good on the face of it, the reality of the situation is that perhaps a few people will get sent to their room for a time-out but that most likely no one is going to lose their job or do any jail time. It’s real CO2 Insanity that those who appear to be promoting bald-faced lies using your tax dollars won’t have much, if anything happen to them. I can hope that this gets enough publicity in the MSM to at least embarrass them good and perhaps get the global warming fraud out more in the public eye, but I’ll bet (like John O’Sullivan) that the MSM (main stream media) will continue to act as though they’re “co-conspirators,” and no one’s going to hear much, if anything from them.

Where’s Perry Mason when you need him? What would they call this episode? How about “The Night of the Missing Climate Change?” Or, “The Case of the Inconvenient FOIA request?”